Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  All these calculations passed through and were resolved in Jellicoe’s mind in sixty seconds. He had received Beatty’s signal at 6:14 p.m. Frederic Dreyer, the captain of Iron Duke, was standing on his bridge when he saw Lion’s searchlight signaling that Scheer’s battleships were to the south:

  I heard the signalman calling each word of Beatty’s reply to Jellicoe’s repeated demand. . . . I then heard at once the sharp, distinctive step of the Commander-in-Chief approaching—he had steel strips on his heels. He stepped quickly onto the platform around the compasses and looked in silence at the magnetic compass card for about twenty seconds. I watched his keen, brown, weather-beaten face with tremendous interest, wondering what he would do. . . . I realized as I watched him that he was as cool and unmoved as ever. Then he looked up and broke the silence with the order in his crisp, clear-cut voice to the Fleet Signal Officer: “Hoist equal speed pendant southeast.” This officer said, “Would you make it a point to port, sir, so they will know it is on the port wing column?” Jellicoe replied, “Very well, hoist equal speed pendant southeast by south.” The officer then called over the bridge rail to the signal boatswain. . . . Three flags soared up Iron Duke’s halyards. We had not yet sighted any German vessel.

  The time was 6:15 p.m.

  To speed things up, while some ships were still acknowledging his flag signal, Jellicoe told his Flag Captain, “Dreyer, commence the deployment.” Dreyer immediately blew two short blasts on the ship’s siren—the mariner’s signal for “I am turning to port”—and ordered Iron Duke’s helm to be put over. The admirals in adjacent columns, all watching Iron Duke, did the same; each blew two short blasts on his flagship’s siren and put over the helm. As the six battleships leading the columns swung to port, those astern followed ship by ship, the entire line falling in line behind the port wing division led by King George V. Iron Duke now was the ninth ship in a single line of twenty-seven British dreadnought battleships. Sir Julian Corbett, the official historian of the Royal Navy in the Great War, calls Jellicoe’s deployment decision “the supreme moment of the naval war”; Professor Arthur Marder describes it as “the peak moment of the influence of sea power upon history.” Jellicoe himself was well aware of the significance of what he had just done. If his calculations were correct, his deployment would deliver the High Seas Fleet into his hands. His fleet would be in a compact line six miles long with all gunnery arcs bearing on the enemy. And it began just as he had hoped: as his battleships were turning into line, the van of Scheer’s fleet loomed up to the south, first as shadowy silhouettes, then more clearly. From Iron Duke, the admiral himself saw three ships on the starboard beam whose shapes were those of the Königs. Turning to the man beside him, Jellicoe said, “Dreyer, I think it is time for you to go to your station in the conning tower.”

  On either wing of this immense fleet, now transforming itself from one formation into another, the British deployment was distorted by the frantic activity of dozens of small ships: the light cruiser squadrons and destroyer flotillas attempting to reach their proper stations screening the battle fleet. As a result, on the port—the northeastern—wing, there was a mass of small ships, “as thick as the traffic in Piccadilly,” weaving and dodging at full speed across the path of the dreadnoughts turning onto their new course. At the opposite—the southwestern—end of the British battlefront, where the starboard wing column was deploying, the congestion was worse. Beatty’s four battle cruisers were charging across the front of the onrushing Grand Fleet dreadnoughts, while his cruisers and destroyers were forced to pass through the area where the battleships were deploying by darting and slipping between the turning dreadnought columns. Thus, as Galatea’s light cruiser squadron dashed between the four battleships of the port wing column, Galatea herself passed close under Agincourt’s bow just as the dreadnought opened fire. Agincourt “fired a salvo over us which fairly lifted us out of the water,” said one of the light cruiser’s officers. “I don’t know how many of her twelve 14-inch guns she fired, but I felt as if my head was blown off.” There were numerous near collisions and some ships had to stop engines to avoid collision. An officer watching from Malaya observed “a light cruiser squadron and a destroyer flotilla gathered together in a very small area on which the enemy was concentrating all available fire. Amidst this perfect deluge of shells, the light cruisers and destroyers were twisting and turning, endeavoring to avoid each other and the big ships. . . . It will never cease to be a source of wonder to me that so few ships were hit and there were no collisions. It must have been one of the most wonderful displays of seamanship and clear-headedness that ever existed.” Later, when participants looked back, the place and the moment came to be called the Windy Corner.

  As the British light cruisers and destroyers scrambled to reach their new positions, another element of Jellicoe’s advance screen, the large armored cruisers of Rear Admiral Sir Robert Arbuthnot’s 1st Cruiser Squadron—Defence, Warrior, Black Prince, and Duke of Edinburgh—were forced by the crunch of ships to break formation and separate. But not before Arbuthnot, whose flagship, Defence, was steaming five miles ahead of Iron Duke, had spotted Bödicker’s light cruisers fleeing from the three Invincibles and leaving behind their crippled sister Wiesbaden. Arbuthnot was a small, lean bantam rooster of a man, a passionate athlete who played rugby and cricket, ran in long distance races, and insisted on acting as chief referee at Grand Fleet boxing matches. His reputation at sea was as a demanding, competitive disciplinarian, but he had never forgotten—or perhaps had not been allowed to forget—that, seventeen months earlier, he had missed a golden opportunity. This was the moment when, on Orion during the Scarborough Raid, he had refused to open fire on German light cruisers directly under his guns, citing the need to await permission from higher authority. The next time, Arbuthnot had sworn to himself—and confided to others—he would not wait. Now, seeing Wiesbaden immobile and billowing smoke, he determined to send the German ship to the bottom. Only his two leading ships, Defence and Warrior, were in position to attack; Black Prince and Duke of Edinburgh had scattered when the press of British dreadnoughts had splintered his squadron. This, to Arbuthnot, was irrelevant; two armored cruisers were enough to finish Wiesbaden, and he turned and charged. His move attracted the admiration of an observer in Warspite who watched as Defence went by, “dressed in all her glory with her battle ensigns streaming.” In his eagerness, Arbuthnot steamed directly across Beatty’s course, steering Defence so close under Lion’s bow that the battle cruiser, firing at Hipper, was compelled to make an emergency turn to avoid ramming. Arbuthnot appeared not to care and his ships closed on Wiesbaden, firing 9.2-inch shells as fast as the gunners could load. But Arbuthnot and his men would pay for his impetuosity. None of the squadron commanders coming up with the Grand Fleet were informed about the enemy’s position and strength and, in the poor visibility, they could not see for themselves. Arbuthnot had not asked permission to attack and no one had warned him that the High Seas Fleet was nearby. Suddenly, as he closed in on Wiesbaden, the massive outlines of Hipper’s battle cruisers and Scheer’s leading battleships loomed out of the mist only 8,000 yards away. Arbuthnot tried to turn back, but it was too late. Two German 12-inch shells struck Defence near her after 9.2-inch turret; the armored cruiser heeled, but righted herself and steamed on. Then, a salvo struck behind the forward turret and there was a cataclysmic explosion. A huge black cloud enveloped everything; when this smoke had cleared, the sea was empty. The 14,000-ton ship, with Admiral Arbuthnot and all 900 men of her crew, had vanished. “Twenty-four hours earlier,” Gibson and Harper note, “Arbuthnot had been playing tennis at Cromarty with Lady Jellicoe.”

  Arbuthnot’s behavior has been described as “berserk,” not primarily because it led to the destruction of his own ship—he could not have foreseen the arrival of the German dreadnoughts—but because his move jeopardized the tactical situation of the entire fleet. Just when Jellicoe needed to exercise the tightest control and discipline in conducti
ng the complex maneuver of deployment, here came Arbuthnot, charging into the middle, intent on his own affairs. In Andrew Gordon’s metaphor, “while center stage should have been clearing for the leading contenders to engage, here was a supporting actor, getting in the way and babbling his own nonsensical lines.”

  Arbuthnot’s second armored cruiser, Warrior, now became the focus of German attention. Heavy shells burst on this ship, smashing through her upper decks, bursting in her engine room, flinging shards of steel through boilers and steam pipes. Steam scalded many in the engine-room crew to death. Now only 8,000 yards from Scheer’s battle line, Warrior seemed certain to share the horror of Defence. Curiously, it was another unscripted performance that prevented this from happening. At the moment Warrior’s doom seemed inevitable, a single British battleship, wholly unintentionally, intervened to save her.

  At 6:00 p.m., Evan-Thomas’s four Queen Elizabeths were still doggedly following Beatty, as they had done or attempted to do throughout the afternoon. But as the British battle cruisers swung eastward, bending Hipper’s line of advance and also cutting directly across the line of fire of the approaching Grand Fleet, Beatty and Evan-Thomas deliberately separated; the position of the Queen Elizabeths, now that Beatty and Jellicoe had joined, was in the Grand Fleet battle line. When an officer on Malaya sighted Marlborough leading the starboard column of the Grand Fleet, Evan-Thomas, assuming that Jellicoe would deploy to starboard and intending to place his fast battleships at the head of the entire line—their assigned place in a fleet action—began turning the 5th Battle Squadron to take station ahead of Marlborough. A minute later, he realized that Marlborough was swinging, not to starboard, but to port; that the fleet was deploying to the east, not the west, and that Marlborough and her 1st Battle Squadron, instead of being at the head of the deployed battle line, would be bringing up the rear. In this context, Evan-Thomas knew that his place was not in the van, but behind Agincourt, the last ship in Marlborough’s squadron, at the very tail end of the entire British battle line. Accordingly, at 6:18 p.m., the 5th Battle Squadron began to turn to port. It was two minutes later that Defence blew up and Warrior, under heavy fire and apparently doomed, began creeping off to the northwest—toward the Queen Elizabeths.

  As Evan-Thomas’s four battleships wheeled under fire from Scheer’s advancing Königs, Barham was forced to turn sharply and reduce speed to make room for Marlborough’s squadron to pass ahead. Then Warspite, turning hard inside Valiant and Malaya, was hit near the stern by a 12-inch shell from Kaiserin. Finding the ship boxed in, the quartermaster “got a bit rattled and forced the helm too quick,” jamming the rudder 10 degrees to starboard. The ship swerved out of line, narrowly missed a collision with Valiant’s stern, and continued to swing. Captain Edward Phillpotts tried to bring his ship back into line by running her engines and port and starboard propellers at different speeds to counteract the effect of the jammed rudder. He managed only to send her driving straight toward the enemy, who now concentrated on this huge target only 8,000 yards away. Still unable to bring his rudder back to port, Phillpotts decided to continue at full speed and drive his ship around in a full circle as quickly as possible. Accordingly, he made a wide turn, his ship plunging through smoke and towering shell splashes, frequently shaken by the concussion of a heavy caliber hit, but all the while still firing back with her eight 15-inch guns. The captain brought the ship around in a complete circle, but the rudder remained jammed. It being essential to present a moving target, Phillpotts took the dreadnought around again in a wider full circle, this time circling clean around the crippled Warrior and drawing enemy fire away from the helpless armored cruiser. Eventually, the battleship’s crew managed to restore a degree of steering control to the rudder and the captain attempted to rejoin his squadron. But Warspite had been hit that day by a total of twenty-nine heavy German shells, thirteen of these during the two turns, and she discovered that at speeds higher than 16 knots, the sea poured in through holes in her hull armor. Leaving her sisters, she withdrew to the north and at 9:05 p.m. Evan-Thomas ordered her to return to Rosyth. Warspite’s misfortune, harrowing as it was, had been Warrior’s salvation, saving the cruiser’s 900 men from the fate of Defence. By careening around in two full circles and drawing the enemy’s fire, the battleship had effectively masked the crippled cruiser and allowed her to escape.

  Invincible had come out of dry dock in Rosyth on the morning of May 22; that afternoon at 5:00, Hood took the battle cruiser and her sisters, Inflexible and Indomitable, north to Scapa Flow for an intensive schedule of gunnery practice. Invincible and her two sisters spent eight days at Scapa. On the morning of May 30, they had been out in Pentland Firth for 12-inch-gun practice; the results were reported as “highly satisfactory.” By 3:45 that afternoon, they were back at anchor in the Flow, coaling and preparing for night firing scheduled to begin after dark. And on the following morning, all of Hood’s ships were due to return to Rosyth. That was the afternoon, however, that Jellicoe and Beatty received the Admiralty’s signal warning of a probable German sortie from the Jade. At 6:25 p.m., Jellicoe told Hood to raise steam for 22 knots, at 8:50 p.m., he ordered him to weigh anchor, and at 9:00 p.m., accompanied by the light cruisers Chester and Canterbury and four destroyers, the three battle cruisers moved down the harbor and out to sea.

  During the Grand Fleet’s deployment, Hipper won another dramatic success against the British battle cruiser force—his third of the day and, as it turned out, his last of the war. Hood, after his bludgeoning of four German light cruisers, including Wiesbaden, continued west in search of Beatty. He sighted the Grand Fleet approaching on his starboard bow and, at almost the same moment on his port bow, Lion charging eastward toward him. The normal station of Hood’s three battle cruisers would have been astern of Beatty; but in maneuvering to reach it, he would have further obstructed the fire of Jellicoe’s oncoming battleships. It was obvious to Hood that he should instead turn ahead of Beatty and take a position in advance of the vice admiral. Accordingly, at 6:21 p.m., Hood led his three battle cruisers around through a 180-degree turn to starboard, taking station 4,000 yards ahead of Lion. Invincible now found herself on a parallel course with the five German battle cruisers, visible 9,000 yards off her starboard beam. As Beatty’s four battle cruisers already were engaging the three rear ships of Hipper’s line, Hood’s three ships, fresh from gunnery practice at Scapa Flow, trained their 12-inch guns on the two leading German ships, Lützow and Derfflinger, and im-mediately opened an accurate fire. “The gunnery of the 3rd Battle Cruiser Squadron was tremendous in its majestic intensity, great rippling salvos running down the line of the three ships. Hits were showing all over Hipper’s battle cruisers,” remembered an officer on Tiger. Within eight minutes, Invincible fired fifty shells at Lützow and hit her eight times. From Invincible’s bridge, Hood shouted into the voice pipe to tell the ship’s gunnery officer, Lieutenant Commander Hubert Dannreuther, in the foretop: “Your firing is very good! Keep it up as quickly as you can! Every shot is telling!”

  Meanwhile, Invincible was receiving as well as inflicting punishment. One salvo hit the battle cruiser aft, but caused no apparent damage. Then, suddenly, Invincible was annihilated. Commander von Hase, gunnery officer of Derfflinger, was watching. “At 6.29 p.m., the veil of mist in front of us split like a curtain at a theater,” he said. “Clear and sharply silhouetted against the horizon, we saw a powerful ship . . . on an almost parallel course at top speed. Her guns were trained on us and immediately another salvo crashed out, straddling us completely.” It was Invincible. Hase fired three salvos and the third fell on Invincible’s amidships Q turret. And then at 6:30, said Hase, “for the third time we witnessed that dreadful spectacle we had already seen in the case of Queen Mary and Defence.” When the German shells penetrated Q turret, the flash ignited the powder in the hoist and traveled down the turret trunk to the magazine, causing both Q and P turrets’ magazines to explode. The whole central section—including boiler rooms, coal bu
nkers, and the two amidships turret systems—was ripped apart in a gigantic ball of crimson flame. Masses of coal dust spurted from the broken hull, the tall tripod masts collapsed inward, and a ball of flame mounted into the sky followed by an enormous tower of black smoke. The ship broke in half and the two severed halves sank until each rested vertically on the bottom. Then, when the smoke had cleared, a curious sight was seen. As the ship was 567 feet long and the sea was only 180 feet deep, the bow and stern were seen standing separately—a hundred feet of bow and a hundred feet of stern, each with red bottom paint and gray topside paint—rising perpen-dicular out of the water. There were a few survivors nearby. These men waved as Inflexible and Indomitable swept past. “I have never seen anything more splendid,” said an officer in Indomitable, “than these few cheering as we raced by them.”